may the force be with you

Athletes with infected scrapes that won't go away. Hundreds of soldiers returning from Iraq with wound infections that don't respond to most antibiotics. Often deadly pneumonias. Ninety-thousand patients who die in hospitals every year. That's the toll in the U.S. from germs that are resistant to existing medicines.

The problem is that many common bacteria and fungi have evolved into being resistant to the drugs that have kept them at bay for a half-century. The problem is not new (see: " Bug Wars"), but it is still getting worse, even as a spattering of new antibiotics and anti-fungal drugs reach the market. Now, doctors are trying to get more attention for the problem, hoping that comprehensive legislation could stimulate drug firms to put more effort into developing new antibiotics.

Today, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, an association of 8,000 infectious-disease specialists, is announcing a hit list of the six most worrisome germs doctors now face in clinical practice. The list, which includes five bacteria and one fungus, is described in the current issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, a medical journal, and will also be unveiled as part of a press conference today. For all of these germs, the authors see very few new drugs being developed and rising rates of illness.

In Pictures: The Six Scariest Germs

In some cases, the problem is particularly gruesome. To treat soldiers returning from Iraq with wound infections caused by Acinetobacter baumannii, doctors are resorting to using a drug called colistin. The medicine fell out of use decades ago because it can cause severe damage to the kidneys (see: " The Iraq Infection"). The authors of the IDSA report note that Acinetobacter can also cause pneumonia; mortality rates for the pneumonia can be 20% or more.

Why are there so few new medicines targeted at resistant bacteria? In the past decade, many big pharmaceutical players, including Wyeth (nyse: WYE - news - people ), Roche and Eli Lilly (nyse: LLY - news - people ), backed off antibiotic research. At the same time, new antibiotics were becoming increasingly difficult to develop. For 30 years--until 2000--there were no new classes of antibiotics approved.

In the past six years, there have been two clear examples: Zyvox, from Pfizer (nyse: PFE - news - people ), and Cubicin, from Cubist Pharmaceuticals (nasdaq: CBST - news - people ). Wyeth's Tygacil and Sanofi-Aventis' (nyse: SNY - news - people ) Ketek have been touted as new classes, and though the distinction can be argued, both were definitely better at fighting resistant bugs.

Drug companies are starting to become interested in antibiotics again. Pfizer, which always kept a presence in developing new germ-killing drugs, saw its Zyvox become a fast-growing drug in recent years. Then it bought antibiotics maker Vicuron last summer; an antifungal medicine from the deal was approved on Feb. 21. Abbott Laboratories' (nyse: ABT - news - people ) Omnicef, an antibiotic pill, saw sales increase 61% to $627 million last year, according to consulting firm IMS Health (nyse: RX - news - people ).

Biotechs are benefiting too. Shares in antibiotic maker Cubist Pharmaceuticals have more than doubled this year based on sales of Cubicin, its injectable treatment for Staphylococcus aureus, one of the bugs topping the IDSA's hit list (see: " A Better Antibiotic?").

But the IDSA authors say the antibiotics in development simply aren't enough. A review of new medicines finds few that work in new ways, meaning that some of the new drugs may hit the market already facing some resistant bugs. And the authors say the drug companies are not developing drugs to treat the organisms that are the biggest health threat. Market forces, they worry, may not take care of the problem.

source:http://www.forbes.com/home/sciencesandmedicine/2006/03/01/antibiotics-pfizer-cubist-cx_mh_0301badbugs.html

# posted by dark master : 3/02/2006 09:31:00 AM  0 comments

Yes, we know - file sharing is definitely not theft

As a man who hacked his first home internet connection back in 1994 (my then boss used his daughter's name as a password) and downloaded his first Star Trek off Peer to Peer back in 2000 (for research purposes only of course - I never inhaled) I hope I know my way around the block.

First though, an apology. File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We're very, very sorry.

If copyright infringement was theft then I'd be in jail every time I accidentally used football pix on Newsnight without putting "Pictures from Sky Sport" in the top left corner of the screen. And I'm not. So it isn't. So you can stop telling us if you like. We hear you.

Railways and canals

Now we've got that out the way, let us ask you a question. Why is it that every time the media starts to talk about the internet they feel compelled to bang on about paedophiles and terrorists and generally come over like a cross between Joe McCarthy and the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?

Although internet service providers sell their internet connections as unlimited usage, if people actually take them up on the offer then they can't actually cope with demand

Well here's one answer - it sells copy. Another answer is that we're totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we're canals, and you all just know how that's going to end.

So we seek to equate the internet with all bad things to scare you off it. At some corporate freudian level, there's some truth to that accusation.

Traffic shaping

But there's a third explanation as well. Sometimes it's legitimate.

Friday's piece sought to make a very sophisticated point in the space of four minutes. The point was this: a file sharing protocol called BitTorrent now takes up a third of internet traffic, even by the most conservative estimates. The true figure is probably higher.

Some internet service providers aren't very pleased about that, because although they sell their internet connections as unlimited usage, if people actually take them up on the offer then they can't actually cope with demand.

"Boo hoo," I hear you say to them. "Build some more wires in or whatever it is you do. That's what we pay you for." But no. The wicked ISPs have, increasingly, opted to block BitTorrent (and indeed other P2P protocols as well) using technology known as traffic shaping.

Encrypting torrents

A couple of months ago a person of my very close acquaintance [cough cough] was giving his in-laws their weekly fix of Desperate Housewives when he noticed that their Plusnet connection was resolutely not shifting the torrent.

Torrent traffic accounts for more than a third of the internet

But as soon as he switched to another torrenting program called Bitcomet, the data just came pouring through. What was going on? Well the answer was simple. There's a mysterious man somewhere on this planet called "RnySmile". He creates and updates the Bitcomet programme, and he'd reprogrammed the damn thing to encrypt the torrents so that it was goodbye "traffic shaping".

Now this was such a good idea that all the other BitTorrent programmers leapt on it within weeks. As of last weekend the three biggest torrent programs carry automatic encryption and Plusnet and friends are looking at a big hole in their metaphorical dyke. Happy ending, you might say? I couldn't possibly comment.

'Swamp of encryption'

However all this made us think the following: if torrent traffic is 30% and more of the internet, and it's going encrypted at a rate of knots, then where does that leave the spooks, spies and other law enforcement professionals who sit around monitoring the internet all day?

Sure, the RC4 encryption in question isn't so very powerful, but the sheer quantity of it we're envisaging will make decrypting it all an impossibility.

At the moment, there's little enough encrypted data flying around that using encryption for villainous purposes would just attract attention to yourself. But in the swamp of encryption that's in prospect, that will no longer be the case.

Debate

Which brings us back to paedophiles and terrorists. If you ask the security services and the police why they monitor the internet, those are the bogeymen they claim to be chasing.

In a four minute piece, we're sort of obliged to take that at face value. And it's our contention that they're not very well going to be able to do that if they're swamped by encrypted torrent data.

This proposition brought us so much sh*t that it had to be continued on the next fan. A howl of primal outrage uttered from cyberspace that we were equating copyright infringement with theft (yes we did - sorry about that) and with paedo-terror (no we didn't).

What we'd really like to hear is a debate on the issue we did raise. If the ISPs can't now detect torrent data, then how will the security services manage it? And if they do figure it out, won't RnySmile and company just up the ante again?

And is this secret war between Hollywood and the ISPs on the one side and the P2P community on the other one that can ever end in a truce, or will the stakes just keep raising and raising to the detriment of us all?

Answers on a plain text postcard please.

source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4758636.stm

# posted by dark master : 3/02/2006 09:29:00 AM  0 comments

There is a new and insidious threat to the World Wide Web: a slowly rising tide of "original content" on Internet sites that is at best worthless, and at worst possibly even dangerously inaccurate.

I should know; I've been writing some of the stuff myself.

Understanding what's happening requires a lesson in modern Web economics. If there is a topic in the news, people will be searching on it. If you can get those searchers to land on a seemingly authoritative page you've set up, you can make money from their arrival. Via ads, for instance.

Then, to get your site ranked high in search engines, it's best to have "original content" about whatever the subject of your site happens to be. The content needs to include all the keywords that people might search for. But it can't be just an outright copy of what's on some other site; you get penalized for that by search engines.

Hence, there has been an explosion of demand for "original content"; Charles Ryder, of WCR Internet Marketing, a consulting firm, says Web masters everywhere want articles written for them and will supply the search engine-friendly keywords to include.

You'd think this would be a godsend for writers. Hah.

Curious to learn more about the process, I bid on some writing jobs on the Web sites where these transactions occur. (I described myself quite honestly: as a Journal reporter interested in freelance work who might also write a Journal story about writing for Web sites.)

I managed to get underbid on numerous jobs before snaring one from a Web entrepreneur I would come to know as "Whirlywinds." I would have to write 50 articles, each 500 words long. Topics to be assigned. Pay: $100. For everything.

My first assignment came a few days later. "The topic would be 'colloidal silver,' " Whirlywinds informed me. But then he added a caveat: "Please EXCLUDE any negative comments, as I sell this product online."

Colloidal silver is one of those bits of medical quackery that thrive on the unregulated Web. I told Whirlywinds I'd rather pass.

He then suggested "bird flu." I was told to describe "where it hibernates for hundreds of years… how quickly it mutates to infect other animals… how it mutates so that it can be passed from human to human."

None of that was true, so I spent a day and a half reading Web sites and interviewing Journal reporters who have covered the issue. (At 15 cents an hour, good thing I had a day job.) I worked very hard to make the piece a useful introduction to the topic.

Indeed, Whirlywinds said the article was "excellent." He then wanted permutations on the piece. But his instructions were confusing, and despite several email exchanges, I couldn't figure out what he wanted me to do next.

Finally, he asked me if I would be willing to simply rewrite some other "content" on bird flu. I agreed, figuring I would be getting an early, unusable draft from another writer.

What arrived, though, looked perfectly -- indeed suspiciously -- professional. I cut and pasted the first sentence into a search engine. Sure enough, the passage had been taken verbatim from the World Health Organization.

"Isn't that from the WHO Web site?" I asked.

"Actually, it's from 10 Web sites," Whirlywinds emailed back, as if that were somehow better. In fact, he had sent me material lifted whole from the WHO, New Scientist and WebMD sites.

My job, it became clear, was to make enough small changes to the text for Whirlywinds to be able to pass it off to search engines as his own. Which is, in fact, what most of the "original content" on these sites turns out to be: cut-and-paste jobs with superficial modifications.

At $2 an article, tops, that's all anyone can afford to provide -- even in India and Eastern Europe, where most of this work gets done. My conscientiousness with the first piece was, in retrospect, comical.

I told Whirlywinds I wasn't comfortable any more. He said all he had ever wanted me to do was take the material and add my "thoughts and conclusions." Still, I decided it was time to halt the gig.

The point of all this isn't to complain that writers are underpaid and overworked; that's old news. It's also not to bust Whirlywinds; there are thousands like him out there.

My beef, actually, is with the search engines and the economics of the modern Web. Google, for example, says its mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The way that's written, one thinks perhaps of a satellite orbiting high above the earth, capturing all its information but interfering with nothing.

In fact, search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it.

Which is what search engines are causing to happen to much of the world's "information." Legitimate information, like articles from the WHO, risks being crowded out by junky, spammy imitations. Nothing very useful about that.

source:http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114116587424585798-0qH9qUYuUug__vRSFKGvxIEwLGw_20070301.html?mod=blogs

# posted by dark master : 3/02/2006 09:26:00 AM  0 comments